What is the future of education? What would the ideal school look like? Will schools even exist in 100 years? 200 years? 1000?

The only reasonable answer must be somewhere close to “we don’t really know”.

However, if there was one thing, just one, we could change right now, some aspect that we can control, what might that be? Well, John Hattie has been researching this issue for some time with his now infamous meta-analyses of educational research. Here is the most updated list of effect sizes, in rank order. Leaving aside the technicalities and possible criticisms of the methodology, what conclusions can we draw from the latest ranking? To me, I walk way with one over-riding thought:

To unpack this a little, here are the mindsets we can control, right now, and know we are making a positive difference for student learning:

We must believe we have the resources required to be as successful as we wish to be, even if sometimes we need to go digging for them.

The first step to achievement, for ourselves and our students, is a ceaseless expectation of it.

So, my one upgrade to school, today? Let’s relentlessly visualise and expect excellence. Let’s have a shared understanding that we hold ourselves accountable for this on a daily basis, and through this mindset, spread an expectation for excellence to our students, to our colleagues, to our school, beyond our schools. The corollary to this, of course, is the resilience to embrace imperfection. In fact, it’s perhaps why being brave enough to fail is so important – it gives us permission to hold exceptional expectations.

So, as I start to look to next year, I will ask everyone that will listen:

The belief alone, in the very possibility of achieving more, will be self-fulfilling.

Together, let’s look down, notice that we hold the key to the prison cell, fit it to the lock and turn.

What if we acted out our belief that learning should be lifelong and that skills and concepts outlast knowledge?

The Backstory

My school uses a number of curriculum frameworks – the Middle Years Programme, the Diploma Programme, Advanced Placements and our own homegrown curriculum. One way of unifying the potentially disparate approaches is to focus on key attributes of curriculum that transcend them all. Our departmental team picked three:

AUTHENTIC – ESSENTIAL – LEARNING TO LEARN

Image of ‘Atlantis Shuttle Launchh 1988’ / NASA / Public Domain

Authentic stresses the relentless need to provide freshness and relevance. Essential captures the importance of meeting the needs of our students, whether those are the inevitable ‘exam ready’ skills, or crucial ‘future ready‘ skills. Learning to learn functions as a foundational concept, highlighting the need to develop lifelong skills in our students.

It’s this last aspect that my team has been playing with recently, re-envisioning the International Baccalaureate’s (IB) Approaches to Learning (ATL) skills as a hexagon of future ready skills, accompanied by guiding questions, and designed for specific courses. Though you should certainly build learning experiences to develop more than six ATL skills in a year, when confronted with the question, ‘Which are the most important skills for a student in my class?’ the most authentic and essential aspects of the vision emerge:

Which are the most important ‘future ready’ skills for students in my class?

But, what if we went further?

What if…

Every student identified, and reflected, on the six ATL skills they felt they needed to develop that year?

Every teacher identified, and shared with students, the six ATLs with which they were engaging?

Every teacher posts the six ATLs on their classroom door, with this note: ‘Dear colleagues, if you can spare the time, please come in and help me with my journey‘

These six skills became the focus of teacher reflection in their professional discussions, both digital and analogue?

Would we then be closer to acting out our belief that learning should be lifelong – that learning to learn is the most future ready skill of all?

At the very least, we might be just that little bit closer to curricular lift off.

Planning instruction for twenty or thirty learners in one room, for one hour, on one day, is a challenge. And, when we talk about planning instruction for in-service days or professional development sessions in which schools invest considerable time and money, we might be talking about hundreds of participants, in various venues, from distinctly heterogeneous teaching backgrounds and many hours of instruction. It’s a significant challenge. However, as I have written about here, it’s a challenge that we must overcome.

Many of my thoughts about school leadership revolve around applying the same practices that make classroom instruction effective. Imagine it as a series of Russian Dolls – the practices at the classroom teacher-learner level a nested microcosm of the interactions at the professional teacher-teacher level. At my school, we have adapted Charlotte Danielson’s teacher evaluation rubric as part of our teacher appraisal process. However, what if something similar were created for professional development sessions or in-service days?

The purpose of the adaptation would be as follows:

As a planning checklist for organising professional development sessions.

As an in-depth reflection tool to rigorously assess the quality of any professional development session and for facilitators to adjust their practices accordingly.

To articulate a shared understanding of the components of high quality professional development sessions.

I’d remove the evaluative aspect of a rubric, replacing it with a series of standards and guiding questions to encourage professional growth. Though there are a variety of schools of thought on the effectiveness of coaching versus supervision models for driving positive change, assuming you have the people in place willing to improve, it’s the feedback, not the ranking of progress, that will drive improvement. Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t construct an evaluative rubric, it’s just that a simpler, more professionally respectful starting point is to use standards as a supportive coaching tool, not an evaluative one.

And, if you followed my thinking, you might be left with something like this.

I wonder what insights are revealed by reflecting on the last professional development you facilitated ,or participated in, by examining it through this new lens?

Twice a year, I run a survey with my students to gain insight into their experience of my instructional practice. This isn’t the only time I seek feedback from them. I’m in the habit of asking for ‘pluses’ and ‘wishes’ every few months, as well as touching base with a few students at the classroom door to ask questions like, ‘Do you enjoy X activity?’, or, ‘Did you find Y helpful?’ The full survey, though, is a mash up of:

I developed essential agreements for our use of this survey in our own high school English department. Here is the Google form version of the survey itself, which you could copy if you wish.

When I do the survey, I time it to coincide with student reports, so it becomes a moment of instructional quid pro quo. And, this year, I debriefed the survey with a small ‘focus’ group from each class. By seeking feedback on how I interpreted the students’ response, I noticed how it helped me to better understand and appreciate their perspective and experiences. One of the questions I found most valuable during this conversation was, ‘If I were to observe one colleague to help me become a better teacher, who would would it be?’ This made me think about how much more powerful professional development might be if we listened more systematically and more thoughtfully to the insights the students already have to offer us. They, after all, are the ones who have daily experience of our craft. So, I’m left wondering if high schools committed to on-going professional development could:

Use teacher-tailored student voice surveys as a raison d’etre for collegial observations.

Have teachers use student input to guide their own professional goal setting.

This post by Kim Cofino was shared by Tricia the other day. It set out the importance of coaching in a school context, specifically technology coaching, but it could apply equally well to other coaching contexts. In the post, Kim outlined four barriers to successful coaching models, and her thoughts on them. I’d like to add one final barrier to her list.

Our time and space for growth might be limited

We need both to be coached and to grow. As a profession, we systematically build in time to plan our lessons with scheduled ‘planning periods’. We also invest time and money into Professional Development (PD) in the form of workshops, meetings, consultants and the like. But, rarely do we build in (nor talk about) time specifically for individual professional growth on a routine basis. As a result, I wonder if we need to re-evaluate what ‘full-time’ means when the needs for continual professional growth are obviously necessary, and arguably, increasingly important. The problem with growth is that it doesn’t make a pile of marking disappear, a meeting run, a lesson plan materialise, nor online curriculum records update, but it does transform how they happen. Growth is quiet, often slow and unassuming, and though it’s not necessarily intangible, it can certainly be ethereal. In other words, it’s just the type of thing we could easily overlook and ignore.

Maybe, when we think about PD budgets, perhaps we need to factor in ‘growth costs’ and re-budget accordingly; reduce the amounts spent on PD input (e.g. workshops, external speakers) and invest more in the time and space needed for the desired outcome, i.e. ‘growth’. We don’t just need planning periods, but ‘growth periods’ too; an acknowledgement that scheduled time needs to be carved out for teachers to talk about their profession, throw ideas around, reflect, act on a coaching conversation, stare blankly at a wall, be aimless in ways that provoke creativity. Here’s the challenge then: school’s need to balance the books while providing the systematic and intentional time and space for growth.

If a school can rise to this challenge, I know where I’d like my children to be educated.

Having just returned from an inspirational week visiting the work done by Second Chance in Berceni, Romania with a group of ten students, it strikes me how important it is not to shy away from frank discussions about a person’s character, conversations which are at best sensitive and, at worst, verging on the taboo. It’s more than a need to comment upon and guide behaviour, it’s the moral necessity to encourage growth in the fundamental virtues inherent to becoming a ‘good‘ person (not that there is an immutable, definitive list).

How did I do on this service learning trip? Not brilliantly, because I didn’t consistently apply the same thinking as I would regarding academic learning in the classroom.

Insufficient pre-assessment. Like any group of people, some students are self-evidently more ‘virtuous’ than others. I had not intentionally considered where the students were in terms of the virtues necessary for the environment we were visiting, such as, the ability to be humble or to act with grace. Nor, importantly, had the students honestly pre-assessed their strengths and weaknesses prior to the visit.

Insufficient differentiation. I did not have a plan in place for what personal growth would mean for each student due to the lack of pre-assessment. What are the student’s weaknesses? Their strengths? What growth is necessary? What might encourage that growth?

Insufficient feedback. The overlap between teacher, counsellor and psychologist is never more apparent than in the realm of character education. So, a student acts gracelessly, or with wonderful grace, how should you provide appropriate feedback in an authentic manner? For each student, where is the line between an expectation met and one exceeded? How do you communicate that in a way that will be heard? Being able to navigate these decisions is as much an art as a science, but it cannot be done without some degree of intentionality.

Looking ahead, above all, I will seek to talk, talk and talk some more with the students about the idea of character. These coaching conversations should help them unpack their personal successes and shortcomings, with a view to educating more than the mind: to nourish their soul.

Habits can be a help and a hindrance. In the context of teaching, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ can be summarised as follows: Good habits make effective teaching and learning practice more effortless; bad habits are those effortless actions that are a drain on effective teaching and learning practice.

However, what are we doing to form good habits, and break bad ones, both in ourselves and the communities we build in our classrooms? This Forbes’ piece here and James Clear’s thoughts here and here neatly summarise popular theories on habit formation. But, I’m interested in the types of habits we should seek to form. Inspired by Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here’s my slightly more mundane, anecdotal Three and a Half Habits of Highly Effective Teachers.

#1) Eat Lunch with Colleagues, Everyday. You need to eat. You also need to press pause, even if it’s only for ten minutes. More importantly, eating with your colleagues is a fundamental social ritual that unites and builds community. Read this Atlantic article for some more family-centric thoughts.

#2) Be Flexibly Inflexible. Rules are rules. Except when they’re a) not and b) they have nothing to do with student learning. A highly effective teacher knows that the most flexible part of the system controls that system (think “steering wheel” and “car”); you know when to bend and when to pushback.

#3) Think Lose-Win(ish). You will always lose. Always. You cannot win and the sooner you unburden yourself of the ceaseless pressure of striving to, then you can start winning-ish. As Dylan Wiliams said, “This job you are doing is so hard that one lifetime isn’t enough to master it.” What does he mean? Your job satisfaction derives from embracing continuous improvement, so, let imperfection be your catalyst for future success.

#3 ½ ): Never Stop (exception, see rule #1). This is the meta-rule, the one rule to rule them all. Highly effective teachers are much like (most) sharks: if you stop swimming, you’ll drown. You must always be updating your practice otherwise the knowledge, understanding and skills that you are uncovering for your students will become swiftly irrelevant before you even know it.